Drones — and ways to defeat them — are evolving far too quickly for traditional weapons development cycles, a company making counter-drone systems said.
Matt McCrann, CEO of DroneShield’s US arm, told Business Insider that “there’s very much a counter-counter fight going on,” and “things are definitely moving quicker.”
Development cycles are weeks now, not months or years, he explained.
A rapidly changing drone war
That rapid pace means that it’s no longer sufficient to offer solutions that only fix the current problem. What’s needed, he said, are the solutions that can handle today’s challenges but also adapt to tomorrow’s.
For this reason, he explained, much of industry is focusing on solutions that are modular, adaptable, and software-first. Software is easier to upgrade than hardware.
Technologies put in the field to do one or two jobs “are now multipurpose” and responding to threats they were never built for, McCrann said, sharing that his company is getting more value out of its systems than first “planned when we put them in the box and shipped them.”
DroneShield builds counter-drone technology that can detect, track, and disrupt drones by jamming their radio links. The Australian company operates across Europe, holds multimillion-dollar US military contracts, and has multiple systems deployed in Ukraine. It’s now seeing surging demand across the West.
The drone threat is growing
McCrann said the number of targets drones can threaten has expanded significantly.
In Ukraine, Russia’s drone attacks have hit not just military infrastructure but also civilian and energy sites, highlighting the reach and effect of drones in modern warfare. Russian and unidentified drones have also appeared across Europe, disrupting airports and prompting Western air forces to scramble. In the US, military bases and even some major sporting events have experienced drone-related disruptions.
Yevhen Titov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
In the West, McCrann said, “we definitely have to expand our thinking as far as the potential threats and how we guard against them” are concerned. He said Western awareness that existing drone defenses are insufficient is “snowballing.”
Ukraine and Russia have both been moving very quickly to develop and invest in counter-drone systems, including interceptor drones and AI-powered turrets designed to shoot down drones. Many of these new systems are homegrown, built in response to new threats that didn’t exist at this scale before.
The race to field new drone tech and weapons to defeat them is relentless in this war. Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of the robotic systems for Ukraine’s Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, which operates ground drones, told Business Insider that “what was up to date and relevant half a year ago is not up to date and relevant anymore.”
The West is watching this conflict carefully, with officials saying that NATO must learn from Ukraine’s experience with drones. Recent NATO exercises have incorporated those lessons, and Ukraine’s rapid innovation has drawn recognition from its partners.
The then-head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Col. Vadym Sukharevskyi, observed in March that “not a single NATO army is ready to resist the cascade of drones.” A major point of concern has been the Western overreliance on expensive missiles, which are less than ideal against swarms of cheap drones.
A new arms race
Much of Europe is concerned that Russia could launch an attack elsewhere on the continent, potentially sparking a wider war. The US, meanwhile, is concerned about China. These potential conflicts wouldn’t look exactly like the war against Ukraine— Western militaries are far better supplied — but given Russia’s and China’s heavy investment in drone tech, drones would likely play a central role. And NATO knows its current defenses aren’t ready.
McCrann said other conflicts won’t look like Russia’s war against Ukraine, but “we now understand that this threat is here to stay and it moves very quickly.”
He said that companies working on a solution must “realize that that is the reality and our solutions have to be different than what this industry was building five, 10 years ago when we first started.”
Many others in the industry can see how fast things are changing. The CEO of Ukrainian autonomous systems developer Ark Robotics told Business Insider that “a lot of the stuff shipped from some Western companies doesn’t really work because they still work in these yearlong cycles.” The problem, he said, is that “what worked last year doesn’t work this year.”
The need for speedy innovation has been highlighted by Western officials, too. Luke Pollard, the UK’s armed forces minister, said this year that this war shows that the way NATO militaries are run is “outdated,” especially when it comes to the pace of procuring weaponry.
He said drone tech “iterates every two to three weeks on the front line” with a “fundamentally different” model.
Across the West, warnings are coming from military leaders, politicians, and industry that weaponry needs to be developed and produced faster, and done so at scale, with many warning that the West’s longtime focus on having fewer pieces of advanced weaponry needs to be changed to make room for a new focus on a bigger volume of cheaper gear.
